Dust Read online

  “What could do that besides strangulation?” Marino squats by her head to see what I’m talking about.

  “An increase of intrathoracic pressure causing the Valsalva effect.” I take off my gloves, my pockets full of used ones now. “In other words, she had a significant rise in blood pressure that resulted in minute hemorrhages.”

  “And that would happen why?” Machado wants to know.

  “Struggling, panicking, possibly while being smothered could be the reason. Maybe something else that caused cardiac compromise. I can’t be certain at this point but preliminarily she’s a homicide and we should work her as one. Let’s get her into the van and I’ll meet you at the office.” I say this to Rusty and Harold as I stand up. “Leave the cloth draped over her exactly as is and wrap her in sheets that hold her body in the position it’s in now.”

  “How’s Anne going to scan her with the arm out like that?”

  “I don’t know if the bore’s wide enough.”

  “She’ll fit,” I reply. “I don’t want her rigor broken.”

  I go on to explain that I want the outstretched arm with its cocked wrist wrapped separately and secured with tape. Another sheet goes around the rest of her body except for her head. From the neck up I want her protected with a large paper evidence bag and I want smaller bags protecting her hands and feet. She will go into the CT scanner fully wrapped.

  “Place the spine board on a clean sheet to protect it from mud. I want her transported exactly as I describe.” I make myself clear because the way her body was posed is evidence that I want preserved.

  Evidence that might be like three other cases, and I can’t say a word to Marino or Machado, and I’m feeling a sense of urgency that is building. I won’t think of getting Benton into trouble for doing what was best, what was right. He wanted my help for the very reason I now fear. The Bureau has mandated an information blackout on the D.C. cases and it’s possible the killer isn’t in that area anymore. He might be killing someplace else and those police departments won’t recognize the pattern. He might be here in Cambridge, where his early victim Klara Hembree was from, and Benton doesn’t know that part yet and I have to find a way to tell him.

  “She goes directly to large-scale x-ray.” I continue to say what I want done. “I’ll make sure Anne is waiting for her. And we have all this photographed in situ, right?”

  Machado assures me that he does as he stares across the field in the direction of Andy Hunter, who has joined other officers on the sidewalk outside the fence where the crowd is growing. Barbara Fairbanks is in front of Simmons Hall interviewing whoever will talk to her, and I detect something I can’t quite hear.

  A Prussian blue smudge across the horizon is the first hint of dawn, and I ask Machado to upload his photographs to me ASAP as what I detect becomes audible. We sharply turn toward the river. We look up at the same time. The rapid stuttering roar becomes louder, a helicopter flying low over the Charles to the southeast, coming closer fast.

  “I hope that’s not another damn TV station,” Marino says.

  “I don’t think so.” I look up at the dark sky. “It’s too big for that.”

  “Military or the Coast Guard,” Machado speculates.

  “It’s not.” I recognize the high-pitched whiny roar of the turboshaft engines and the staccato thump-thump of its composite blades turning almost at the speed of sound.

  “Let’s cover her up until it’s gone,” Harold exclaims. “We can’t hold up the sheet with all the wind.”

  “You’re fine.” I indicate for them to stay put, to keep the barrier in place, shielding the body from the TV crew and spectators. I raise my voice to a yell. “Hold your position for now. It will be all right.”

  The helicopter appears in a deafening storm of strobing lights over apartment buildings, cutting across the field. It flies directly overhead at about a thousand feet, high enough to spare us its turbulent rotorwash. Lucy knows how to navigate a crime scene and she hovers high, the fifty-million-candlepower Nightsun flooding the red clay and whiting out the body, then she moves on.

  We shield our eyes at the same time and turn the same way at the same time, following the ominous-looking EC145 as it circles the field. It swoops around again much lower and slower, making what Lucy calls high-and-low recons as she checks for obstructions such as antennas or power lines or light standards, any danger she might perceive. I can make out the shape of her helmet in the right pilot’s seat, an amber visor lowered over her face. I can’t tell who is next to her with a headset on but I know. What I’m not sure of is why. But I couldn’t be more relieved.

  “Stay right here!” I call out to Rusty and Harold over the deafening noise. “Don’t move yet!”

  I walk swiftly through mud and the soaking grass to the empty parking lot as the snub-nosed wide-bodied helicopter lowers into a hover. It hangs in the air, trees thrashing at the edge of the tarmac in the blinding glare. Then it gently sets down. Lucy doesn’t cut the engines to flight idle. She’s not going to stay long.

  The left front door opens and Benton plants one foot on the skid, then the other, climbing down.

  His coat flaps in the violent wind as he opens the back and reaches inside for his luggage as my helmeted niece turns toward me from the right seat and nods. I raise my hand, not sure what the reason might be for what she’s just done but I’m extremely glad. It’s almost like a miracle, like something I would have prayed for, had I thought about praying.

  Benton trots across the tarmac and I take one of his bags as he slips his arm around my waist, pulling me close, nuzzling the top of my head with his jaw. The helicopter lifts in a steep vertical ascent, nosing back to the river, and we watch it pick up speed over buildings and trees, banking around toward Boston. Its whir and winking lights recede as quickly as they appeared.

  “Thank God you’re here but I don’t understand,” I say to him when the noise is gone.

  “It was supposed to be my birthday surprise.”

  “Somehow I don’t believe that’s the only reason.”

  “It’s not and I didn’t plan on being here this early.”

  “Saturday, I thought.”

  “I mean this early today.” He kisses me and pins his attention to the scene illuminated in the middle of the mud where Rusty and Harold continue to hold up a plasticized sheet like morbid bunting. “A present to myself, a surprise for you, and I needed to get the hell out of D.C.”

  “Lucy got my text.” It begins to make sense, I think.

  “Yes.” Benton scans the wet grass and soupy red mud. He stares for a long moment at the body draped in white. “But she’d known since around midnight that Gail Shipton was missing. Her search engines found it posted on Channel Five’s website.”

  He explains that Lucy flew to D.C. yesterday, setting down in Dulles in the late afternoon, and the plan was to have dinner with Benton and then the two of them would fly home today. As a surprise she would deliver him to the house, where she assumed I’d still be getting over the flu. Then when she got the alert that Gail was missing, Lucy decided they needed to leave immediately.

  “The first thing she said was that something had happened to her and she was probably dead,” Benton explains. “Is the white cloth she’s wrapped in yours?”

  “That’s the way she was found.”

  He stares silently at the scene in the distance and I know he’s compiling data, taking in the details. Already he is.

  “The first victim was from Cambridge. Klara Hembree.” I let him know what I’m worried about. “The cloth is unusual and the way it’s wrapped around the body looks exactly the same as what I saw in Klara’s case and the other most recent two. Wrapped around under the arms like a big bath sheet.”

  I go on to explain that my preliminary examination of the body revealed no indication that she struggled or made any attempt to defend herself. Then I describe the way she’s posed and the fluorescing residue all over her and the cloth, which I suspect is a woven syn
thetic blend. I tell him the low-stretch fabric is similar to Lycra and the fibers recovered in his cases are Lycra, and then I let him know about the urine-stained panties that are too big.

  Benton listens carefully, compiling the information, sorting through it, and what I’m saying registers strongly but he’s going to be cautious about jumping to conclusions.

  “Do you know what kind of panties?” he asks.

  “The label?”

  “Yes.”

  “Expensive ones,” I reply.

  A high-quality cotton, pale peach, a Swiss designer, I explain and he says nothing at first. But I see it in his face. What I’m saying means something to him.

  “The third victim in D.C.,” he then says. “Julianne Goulet liked expensive Swiss lingerie, a brand called Hanro.”

  “That’s what this is. And I recall from her reports that she was about five-foot-seven, weighed around one-forty, and that could be a size medium.”

  “They could be hers. He has a connection here and I believe he stalked Klara while she still lived here and followed her to D.C. when she moved.” Benton says what is racing through his mind. “She was a target and the most recent two were an opportunity, and now this? If so, it’s at least three murders in one month. He’s comfortable here – specifically, in this area of Cambridge – but he’s out of control and that’s why he’s escalating. I need to look around, and I’m not going to suggest anything until I’m sure.”

  He won’t pass on this information to Marino, Machado, or any of the police working this case. Benton isn’t going to tell them they’re looking for a serial killer until there can be no doubt.

  “And there’s going to be a major problem if it’s the same killer. The Bureau will deny it,” he adds stunningly. “I’m going to need to spend some time out here.”

  He’s not going to explain right now. He wants to get going.

  “I don’t guess you have a pair of boots in your bag.” I look down at his shoes, a burnished brown leather slip-on with a double monk strap. “Of course you don’t. What am I asking?”

  He wouldn’t have rubber boots in his bag. In fact, he doesn’t own a pair. Even when Benton is working in the yard he looks perfectly put together. He can’t help it. One of these long, lean, chiseled men, he looks rich and well bred even at a crime scene in the middle of mud.

  “Is her ID confirmed?” His sharply handsome face turns to me, the set of his jaw serious, his thick silver hair mussed by the wind.

  “Not officially.” I walk us toward the alley so we can leave his bags by Marino’s SUV. “But there’s little doubt. We’re working under the assumption that it’s the woman who disappeared last night, Gail Shipton.”

  “Lucy says it looks like her. Of course that was from a distance but she zoomed in.” Benton buttons his long cashmere coat with one hand. “She caught it on film, the position of the body, the way it’s draped, which is significant, very much so. You’ll have an aerial if you want it. I realize there’s a lot to explain but we won’t get into it here. We can’t.”

  “At least tell me why we can’t.”

  “Marino picked up Gail Shipton’s phone from the bar and apparently still has it.”

  “I don’t understand how you could know…” I start to say as we near the SUV and Quincy begins to whimper.

  “Not now, Kay,” Benton says calmly. “We can’t mention this in front of Marino, not the part about the phone or him finding it and that Lucy knows he did. She literally saw him do it because she’d been monitoring the phone remotely since she learned that Gail was missing. Lucy knew since midnight that Gail’s phone was still at the Psi Bar outside where she’d used it last.”

  “Lucy was working with her.” I’m sure of it now. “The phone in a military-grade case, the same type of case Lucy and I have.”

  “It’s a problem.”

  What he means is that Lucy is a problem or she’s about to become one. If Gail Shipton’s smartphone is of proprietary interest to my niece, then it’s related to some project she’s been working on. She’ll interfere with the police investigation. Maybe she already has.

  “You’re aware of the timing. Gail Shipton was supposed to be in court in less than two weeks.” I have no doubt he knows that too and my uneasiness returns with a vengeance.

  What has Lucy gotten herself into this time?

  “There’s a lot to talk about, Kay.” Benton strokes the back of my neck but I’m not reassured.

  “Is she involved in the lawsuit?” I have to know that much. “Is she involved in Gail Shipton’s hundred-million-dollar war with Double S, a money-management firm headquartered very close to her place in Concord?”

  We stop at the rear of Marino’s SUV and set down his bags as Quincy begins to whine louder and bark.

  “Lucy’s a witness,” Benton says. “The defendants’ counsel deposed her last summer.”

  “And she never told us?” I wonder if this is what Carin Hegel wants to talk to me about.

  “I think you know by now that she handles things her own way.”

  “What she’s handled her own way now involves a homicide that could be connected to the ones you’re working,” I reply. “Maybe the timing of the trial is nothing more than a coincidence but it’s troubling, extremely troubling. And I know her attorney Carin Hegel has been sufficiently worried about her safety to not live at home right now. She feels the Double S people are dangerous and hinted they may be in bed with people in high places.”

  “The position of the bodies, the cloths haven’t been leaked that I know of,” Benton says as Quincy’s barking and crying crescendo.

  “Then it’s unlikely we’re talking about a copycat.”

  “Probably not the real reason Granby’s withholding every damn thing about the cases but it’s a good thing in this instance,” Benton says with the hard edge his tone takes when he’s talking about his boss.

  I text Harold to come unlock the CFC van.

  “The mud will pull your shoes right off your feet. Hopefully, we’ve got an extra pair of rubber boots you can wear. It’s okay.” I do my best to comfort Quincy, patting the back windshield of Marino’s SUV. “Everything’s fine,” I promise.

  Benton stares at Marino’s puppy, barking and pawing, unhappy inside his crate.

  “Poor damn dog,” he says.

  13

  The scene is a churned-up muddy vacancy in the middle of an academic empire that has begun to stir. It is a few minutes past eight, the body transported to my office a while ago as it began to get light.

  The sun is low behind brick buildings where the Charles runs languidly into the river basin and then becomes the Boston Harbor and empties into the sea. Patches of blue peek through cumulus clouds as they change shape and move and the wind has died down. There is no threat of rain as I wait in the parking lot by the open gate, waiting for Benton. I won’t leave while he’s here doing what he does, alone and in the place he gets, a painful place, a barely tolerable one.

  I pace the wet asphalt, on and off my phone as I witness his isolation while he works, and I remember why I’ve always been drawn to him even when I didn’t know I was. I watch him and feel how much I love him. I no longer remember not loving him, and it didn’t start out like that. My dislike of him was intense at first when I was the brand-new chief medical examiner of Virginia and he was the Wizard of Odd as Marino snidely called him. I found Benton Wesley’s handsomeness and acumen a little too sharp, instantly deciding he was austere like his expensive, understated suits, his demeanor lightly starched like his shirts.

  At that time of my life I was into wash-and-wear men who required no effort to maintain with no harm done. I wanted men who were easy to clean up after, cheap men, simple men to have sex with, to be served and serviced by, so I could forget what I know for a while. I had no interest in a Bureau big-shot profiler, certainly not an elitist married one whose legend preceded him through the door like the earthy fragrance of his aftershave.

  I’d been
in Richmond but a brief time, up against odds I couldn’t possibly have foreseen, when I took the job in a commonwealth overrun by men in charge. I was prepared to dislike and dismiss Benton Wesley. I’d heard about his privileged New England upbringing. He was considered gifted and glib, the gun-toting special agent with a crystal ball who was quoted in Time magazine as saying that violent sexual psychopaths are the Rembrandts of killers.

  The analogy was offensive to me. I remember thinking What a pedantic narcissist, and in retrospect it surprises me we didn’t become lovers sooner. It took the first time we worked a case together out of town, hundreds of miles southwest in rural Blue Ridge foothills, in a cheap motel where I would go back with him a thousand times were it still there and exactly as I remember it.

  Our lying and sneaking was worthy of drug addicts and drunks. We stole any private moment we could find, shameless and bold, extremely skilled at getting away with our crime. We rendezvoused in parking lots. We used pay phones. We didn’t leave voice mails or write letters. We conferred on cases we didn’t need to discuss, attended the same conferences, invited each other to lecture at academies we ran, and checked into hotels under pseudonyms. We left no evidence and created no scenes, and after he was divorced and his daughters no longer spoke to him we continued our addictive relationship as if it were illegal.

  On Vassar Street now, Benton disappears inside Simmons Hall, a honeycomb of cubed windows that brings to mind a metal sponge. I have no idea what he’s doing or why, although I suspect he wants to get an emotional reading of the galactic-looking monolith. He wants it to tell him if it’s involved in what I don’t doubt is a homicide, one that could easily mislead, but I know her death wasn’t quiet or gentle. I can see it in her bloodred eyes and imagine the roaring in her head and the building of pressure.

  I glance down at my phone as a text lands from my technician Anne, a sensible, pleasant radiologic expert who has managed to cross-train herself in many disciplines. The body is in the CT scanner and Anne has discovered a curiosity.